In Campaign Reform Issue, One Word Stands Out: Now : With Americans’ trust at an ebb, fast action is crucial

The time for national campaign finance reform is now. Not later this year. Not after more hearings. Not after a commission studies the issue. Now.

This is the national imperative of the moment. There is no reason that corrective legislation cannot be passed and signed into law with dispatch. The ides of March is a reasonable deadline.

Both major parties are suffering a crisis of public confidence over how they raise and spend campaign money. Everything they do will be tainted until this matter is resolved.

Republicans and Democrats, House and Senate and the White House must come together in action. No more whining that reform might hurt “us” more than it hurts “them.” No more complaining that the legislation needs fine-tuning. No more excuses. Now.

The vehicle is at hand: a bill sponsored by Sen. John McCain, a Republican from Arizona, and Sen. Russell D. Feingold, a Democrat from Wisconsin. The McCain-Feingold bill has been around for several years. It enjoys substantial bipartisan support. It attacks the fundamental flaws and loopholes in the campaign finance regulatory system adopted in the wake of the Watergate scandal of the 1970s.

Most notably, the measure would ban the use of the invidious “soft money.” At its core, soft money is a device for laundering big contributions so they can be used in campaigns in a manner that would otherwise violate federal law.

Soft money reached obscene levels in the last campaign, more than $200 million in contributions to the Democratic and Republican national committees. This practice must end. Now.

For more than four years, President Clinton has talked about reforming campaign finance laws. He and House Speaker Newt Gingrich shook hands on it back in 1995 in New Hampshire. Empty words. Meaningless handshake. Clinton, Gingrich, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and the two party chairmen must put the full force of their positions behind the bill. Now.

The post-Watergate reforms were intended to limit the influence of big-bucks campaign gifts by barring corporate contributions to candidates and limiting individual gifts to $1,000 and those of political action committees to $5,000.

However, there were few restrictions on contributions to the parties, and for a reason. In a period of declining party relevance, the idea was to encourage individuals to be active in politics, to maintain a strong two-party system. This money was to be used for grass-roots organization, voter registration, get-out-the-vote drives and the like. What the law said was that this money could not directly benefit any particular candidate or be spent with that candidate’s knowledge or influence.

However, there has been an explosion of the use of soft money to finance television campaigns ostensibly promoting the parties’ positions on issues. Mostly they have been thinly disguised candidate ads, a violation of the spirit of the law at best. This is a perversion of a presidential election system in which each side was given $62 million in public money to finance the most recent campaign.

And there are other defects in the system. The McCain-Feingold bill, although it of course would not plug every potential loophole, would deal with many of them.

Clinton and the Democratic Party have offered to give up some of the fund-raising practices that generated so much heat late in the 1996 campaign. It’s a nice gesture, but not a solution. What the nation needs is a tough new campaign law covering everyone. Now.